Beat The GMAT has a New Pair of Shoes
For those of you who are regular visitors to Beat The GMAT, you might have noticed that weve significantly changed the design of the website today.
Just three months ago, on August 17, 2009, Beat The GMAT underwent a major transformation, evolving this community from a site that just featured a simple GMAT discussion forum into a full GMAT/MBA learning portal. Why, might you ask, did we perform another major overhaul of the site today (and so soon after our first launch)?
Its simple: we listened to your feedback and we responded. The big takeaway we got from listening to you was that you wanted Beat The GMAT to be simpler to navigate and simpler to find the information you need to succeed on the GMAT and gain admissions into your dream MBA program.
Id like to take a moment to highlight just a couple changes weve made:
Lots More White Space
Youll notice that we've pulled out a lot of our fancy graphics and design treatments from the previous site. Our mission for this new site design was as follows: strip down Beat The GMAT to only the necessary things needed to keep this community happy. Our hypothesis was that by doing so, wed make this website easier to use.
I think we accomplished our goal. Let us know if you think otherwise.
New MBA Discussion Section
This overhaul was way overdue. For years, people have been asking us to focus more on building out the MBA application discussion forums on Beat The GMAT. Today we finally got around to doing it.
Compared to what we had before, youll see that the layout for this new MBA discussion section is much simpler to understand. Weve also added a new forum called MBA Student Life, where community members will be able to talk with current MBA students about their MBA experiences. (Note: this is not a forum meant for application questions)
The MBA students we have participating in the MBA Student Life forum so far include:
- From the Haas School of Business
- Bernie Lin, 2nd Year
- Bhavin Parikh, 2nd Year
- Hansoo Lee, 2nd Year
- Pejman Pour-Moezzi, 2nd Year
- From Harvard Business School
- Katharine Nevins, 1st Year
- Puja Ramani, 1st Year
- Zack Zackrison, 1st Year
- From the Kellogg School of Management
- Angela Cheung, 1st Year
- Sandra Kim, 1st Year
- From the Stanford Graduate School of Business
- Pepe Carillo, 1st Year
- Tal Morgenstern, 1st Year
- From the Wharton School
- Juergen Manke, 1st Year
- Kathy Liu, 1st Year
More students to come. If you are a current MBA student interested in representing your program, please send us a message or leave a comment below.
Your Forum Profile is Prettier and Now Actually Useful
Weve dramatically re-organized the data featured in your forum profiles. And now your profiles actually help you track your latest posts as well as your post that have been most thanked by the community.
On a slight side note, I hope that you all realize that we have a thanks feature in the forum. If you encounter a post that is particularly good, be sure to thank the member who submitted the post by hitting the thanks button. Its always nice to show appreciation.
Posting Messages is Easier
If you are registered for the forum, definitely try posting a message or sending a private message. Youll find that the interface is much simpler than before.
This part of our design was extremely difficult to implement, so we hope that you like what we did.
Tell Us What You Think
This article covers only a portion of the work that we've done for this design launch. I very much hope that weve nailed your request to simplify things. Please let us know by responding to the comments below.
Stay tuned, we have a LOT of exciting new features coming soon to help you prepare for the GMAT and get admitted into business school! You're going to love being a part of Beat The GMAT (even more).
Thanks very much for your help in building this community!